This specific case is not a great test bed for this, but it's absolutely a big problem that newspapers will publish the full name of someone who was arrested, even if they're subsequently released without a conviction or even without charges. It's a massive and dangerous weapon in the hands of law enforcement (and others) that they can permanently damage someone's reputation—harming their future job prospects and social connections forever—without ever having to prove anything.
This isn't a problem that's going to be solved by lawsuits, though, partially because Streisand and partially because in most of the cases where someone's hurt by this the newspapers have no legal obligation to refrain from publishing, so there's no grounds to sue. What we need is to reevaluate the law in light of "the internet never forgets".
> It's a massive and dangerous weapon in the hands of law enforcement (and others) that they can permanently damage someone's reputation
I'd love to see people take the real lesson here - an arrest proves nothing of guilt, and it's surprisingly easy for cops to falsely arrest someone (whether they intended to or not).
Our legal system is flawed enough as it is. When there are real concerns that can be raised over some cases that make it all the way to conviction we should be treating arrest records about as seriously a a politician promising the moon in a stump speech.
This is a really great idea in theory. Do you have a proposal for how to get there without stepping over tens of thousands of broken lives? How do you go about educating an entire population that's accustomed to thinking that arrest=guilt that this isn't true, especially when their news sources continue to report as though the arrest is the only really interesting part of the criminal justice system?
I don't know how it would mesh with the US constitution, but Canada, while still having freedom of expression, has much stronger rules about police and courts releasing names. Judges will happily kick all reporters out of a courtroom if personal details are leaked in the press. They will castigate police and prosecutors if they release too much information that could taint the jury pool, etc.
There is no legal need for jails and police to release all of the details and photos that they do. A simple notice that a person is in police custody fulfills the argument against hidden arrests, while also not providing enough to damage a reputation. Announcing arrest reasons before charges have even been laid is unconscionable in a world where googling a name is this easy.
I always understood this to be a trust issue. "We" (loosely, I'm English) tend towards trusting the courts, so we allow them to keep secrets. The US was built on a healthy distrust of the state, so names were released so people aren't "disappeared".
But the US has moved much more towards "no smoke without fire", leaving the release of names in an antiquated place.
But my point is that releasing a name is different than releasing an unflattering booking shot and an arrest reason that hasn't been brought to a court, or even been referred to a prosecutor for validity.
Bogus charges get dropped all the time, but the mugshot and uncharged arresting reason are still posted for all.
This is a dangerous tool in the hands of a flawed institution. We know that people get arrested for trumped up charges, or outright fabrications that later get silently dropped.
Point being, if all you do is maintain a list of names of who you have in custody, you are fulfilling the American Habeas Corpus requirements. There's no constitutional requirement that mugshots need to be released publicly on the internet, there's no rule that the police need to announce what crime a person is suspected of before a charge has been laid. Americans can maintain a healthy distrust of police without wholesale public release on the internet of the details of an arrest.
That's such a huge gray area though. One doesn't know why an employer or anyone else decides to fire, or not hire, someone unless the employer documents the reason.
We already have discrimination laws on the books in the US that can't reliably be enforced for this exact reason. I have heard multiple accounts of very clear discrimination taking place in org hiring practices, but they are never documented and when discussed everyone is very careful with their words.
> One doesn't know why an employer or anyone else decides to fire, or not hire, someone unless the employer documents the reason
It won't be entirely effective. But it gives companies plausible deniability. I've been the one who voiced up because a sealed marital-dispute arrest came up in an archival background check. Having such a law would have meant doing so was unremarkable, a routine comment.
But are they allowed to not hire someone if doing so would draw public outrage (and financial harm) against the company? What about if the person was arrested for something that would cause that, but never actually charged?
In the US at least, being arrested (or even accused) of certain things can end your career. Because, even it it's proven you didn't do it, no company will touch you with a 10 foot pole, because people (who don't care/know that you were innocent) will avoid the company if they hire you.
"But are they allowed to not hire someone if doing so would draw public outrage (and financial harm) against the company?"
Could you face the same because of gay/trans/etc hiring? That's the point of anti-discrimination laws - that nobody is allowed to discriminate and thus the public outrage is diluted if all are hiring the "undesireables".
"Allowed to" pulls a lot of weight here, do you mean legally, socially, or something else?
I do agree though, there's no good solution to the problem. That's one of the biggest indicators for me that state regulation, at least enforceable regulation, isn't the right answer.
Companies, employees, industry organizations, etc can all come up with their own solutions that they're happy with though. A primary feature of federalism is allowing smaller groups to try different solutions, its pretty good at more quickly finding a solution that may actually work well enough universally
If you're constitutionally innocent until proven guilty, then you could create anti-discrimination protection laws that make it illegal to discriminate based on arrests without convictions.
It's already illegal to discriminate against a lot of things that people still choose to keep secret rather than rely on the law to protect them. Many people hide their diagnosed disabilities rather than trust that their employer will follow the law, because your advancement actually can be limited by exposing it even if it's technically illegal.
Anti-discrimination laws also fail to protect people from the social consequences of the unwarranted publicity.
These aren't the situations we're discussing. The arrest is found through a background check, not disclosure. This is about companies avoiding public backlash for hiring someone with an arrest.
Don't most companies have a code of conduct or reputation brand protection policies? Anything that could cause "public backlash" would violate company policy. Not sure how it works for hiring, but it seems to hold up for firing. A company should have a right to protect their brand, within anti-discrimination bounds. Being arrested and having an arrest record, wrongly or not, is not the same as intrinsic human properties, such as being--for example--black and/or female etc.
So how would that work for types of people who maybe are arrested without being charged as a result of a protected attribute? You mentioned black people, so is it OK that they are disproportionately squeezed out of jobs this way?
According to the constitution, innocence is an intrinsic human property.
> so is it OK that they are disproportionately squeezed out of jobs this way?
I didn't say it was right, but I do believe that looking at it from the perspective of the burden being placed on a company is looking in the wrong direction. The names should not even be released unless convicted or settled--or at earliest at pre-trial (since more evidence can come forward if it's there). Those without charges should not have their name in the public, and that's where the focus should be.
> how would that work for types of people who maybe are arrested without being charged as a result of a protected attribute?
As I said, I am unsure how it works for hiring, but for firing it could be a violation of company policy and that's what the firing is for, not a protected attribute.
Even you working through this makes clear how it is to draw this line though. One extreme is only making names public after a conviction. That line is at least clear, though it does have downsides. Another extreme is making names public as soon as a person has ant interaction with police, similarly that is at least a clear line but has obvious issues.
Lines like this can't be drawn easily. When in doubt inaction from the government should be the default. In this case that would mean the government not publicizing names at all, just process a case and move on.
But why should the public backlash over a company hiring someone with an arrest?
The public has direct interest in the company. More importantly, an arrest record alone means very little and if the person wasn't convicted they are supposed to be presumed innocent.
Uh, no, I'm talking about companies finding arrest records on a cursory Google search and avoiding that candidate in favor of other options, not because they don't want the backlash but because why would they hire them when there are other options?
If they aren't worried about some backlash for hiring a person arrested for domestic violence, then why would they pick another? If there's no potential for backlash, then there's no reason to avoid them or pick "other options".
I never said we need to educate people or that this idea, or any other for that matter, should be driven from a top-down approach. I wish people would learn it for themselves, not that the idea would be forced upon them.
The idea is simple though, and I don't think it requires anything other than old ideas.
A person is innocent until proven guilty. Period. End of story. An arrest proves very little and says nothing of guilt, just take it for what it is.
The news may portray things wrong but people should be expected to, and given the trust to, think for themselves. The news can talk about an arrest however they want, its up to hear it, think critically, and take whatever meaning from it that I choose to take.
I wish that too, but wishing people would be different than they are doesn't make it so. You have to act to make a change, and if there's no path to effect change in the people the next best thing is to change the laws to protect people from each other.
I'm on board with this only to the extent of better supporting informed consent. The answer, in my opinion, is never to have someone in charge that believes they know what is best and forces that solution on everyone.
That model is just too fragile, to dehumanizing to the those being mandated to, and too centralizing of authority that can be abused by someone later.
An arrest indicates probable cause a crime happened. It also for instance voided my complaint to the medical board when I complained I was treated without consent for a fabricated medical search for drugs without a warrant. It can also be used against you in immigration processes.
> An arrest indicates probable cause a crime happened
It does, though you have to take that with a grain of salt. It isn't hard to find examples of arrests that go no where and were based on weak probable cause.
The wright one puts behind probable cause also depends a lot on how much they respect the police. When people call for defending the police, for example, I wouldn't expect they care at all about an arrest record.
I was arrested once for being close to the scene of a near accident. No damage done, I was on foot, cop saw a brown kid standing nearby and arrested me for public intox. (I blew a 0.0 and was not under the influence).
Totally screwed my day, ticket was dropped but that didn't save me from getting hauled to jail, fingerprinted, and thrown in a cell for 6 hours before they wrote me a ticket and kicked me out at 3 in the morning in downtown ~20 miles from home with no cell phone and no one able to help me out.
Immigration is a case where its legally used against you. Technically I believe its a case where law enforcement isn't directed to go out of their way to enforce immigration laws, but if you interact with the police and they find you to be here illegally it becomes a situation where their guidance is to suddenly begin enforcing it.
> And neither does a guilty verdict in a court of law
We all agree to live in a system where a guilty verdict reached BT a jury of your peers means that you were legally found guilt. That still doesn't technically mean you did it, but it does mean you are legally deemed guilty.
Is the court system flawless? Absolutely not, I've seen that first hand. But guilt, in a legal sense, has a definition and is directly linked to that jury verdict.
It's a problem, but the counterbalancing problem is (IMO) an equally big one: the public has a legitimate interest in how the criminal justice system handles cases, particularly when cases are dismissed before entering a public trial period.
Florida has the worst possible version of this, where local governments/PDs appear to revel in publishing mugshots with virtually no pretense. But if I was a taxpaying citizen in SF, I believe I would be right in feeling entitled to read more about why a domestic violence case with a pre-existing written statement was dismissed and then sealed.
It's all well and good in theory, but no one publishes the follow-ups because they don't get engagement. Unless there's a very good story behind it, the vast majority of dismissals go entirely unreported, so the only record you get is that so and so was arrested. If it turns out that they arrest someone else for the same crime, you might get a follow-up that mentions that the original person was exonerated. But you certainly don't get a report that "such and such wasn't actually as exciting as it first appeared so charges were dropped".
As you say, this case is the exception, but there has to be a decent middle ground that allows exceptions and doesn't allow casual voyeurism.
If you release arrest records, people who are innocent have their reputations sullied.
If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.
(Why so many arrests that don't lead to charges is interesting. People who prove innocent is one cause, and another is prosecutors only advancing really strong cases to maximize conviction rates is another. These are hard to tell apart.)
So, the right now when we publish arrest records we give police the tool to create some lasting harm to people without strong proof, but make it harder for them to capriciously arrest people or for prosecutors to abuse their discretion.
I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers. If I have to go down to the county courthouse to get access to the records, then there's a barrier that prevents people from casually googling someone and learning that they were arrested at one point.
If every arrest is published with both first and last name in the local newspaper, which is then archived online and fully indexed, that doesn't seem to be serving the cause of government transparency so much as the cause of sensational local news.
I also think that allowing publication of the arrest but without the full name of the alleged criminal would address concerns about government accountability while not handing a dangerous reputational weapon to the police.
I think that if we can't define a category like that then the next century is going to be pretty awful in a lot of ways. If "public" automatically means "accessible instantly from anywhere in the world and irreparably archived forever", then we're either going to have to have a lot of stuff pulled from the public space or we're going to have a lot of lives ruined by all kinds of "public" stuff.
> If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.
In Germany, the media aren't legally allowed to publish the full names of suspects, only first name and first letter of surname. What if the law said law enforcement had to release all arrest records promptly to the media, but without surnames or photographs?
> If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.
Hot take: you could have professinal journalists who have trafficked in the incidents but reserved publication of them investigate patterns of misbehavior in community institutions like the police.
I mean, you can't now, as we seem to have crossed some kind of rubicon and abandoned investigative professional journalism for blogspam and tabloid, but that had been the functioning alternative for a while there. Maybe we can find a new functioning alternative?
You can’t understand the journalism problem until you face that it has always been propaganda and PR. We just didn’t know how bad it was until we had alternative sources.
Maybe there was a little more effort, beyond writing up a tweet or Reddit conversation. But at its core Journalism is narrative crafting (or narrative repeating). And fueled by upper class peer recognition.
> As you say, this case is the exception, but there has to be a decent middle ground that allows exceptions and doesn't allow casual voyeurism.
I agree, although I think that middle ground is elusive :-)
Two things that strike me as easy to do and unequivocally good from a civics/civil liberties perspective: forbidding "mugshot" journalism (cf. Florida) and forbidding "perp walks" by local PDs. Both disproportionately punish the poor/underprivileged and directly promote the kind of reputational sullying that local PDs revel in.
Criminal charges (and even timely arrest records) are public in New York too, but we don't have nearly the same "Florida man" phenomenon.
(Maybe the devil is in the details here? I don't know if Florida requires releasing the mugshot with arrest records, or whether that's something that municipalities do because there's local demand for it, or what.)
Personally, I love how Florida telivises it's court proceedings. I think it really strengthens the oversight and trust people can have in the judicial system.
It’s a double-edged sword. If the press is prohibited from reporting on arrests, you can end up with people just apprehended without a trace. The US certainly isn't above that, especially for "national security concerns."
I’m not sure what the right balance looks like, but it’s definitely not a straightforward issue to resolve.
I can't remember the last time I saw news reports about an arrest where the arrestee plausibly benefited from the story being publicized. Maybe Snowden (who I think was charged but not arrested)?
I think you'll find that where the state has an interest in keeping something under wraps it will be kept under wraps. Most arrest reports are of the casual voyeuristic kind, not serious journalism trying to keep the government accountable.
> I can't remember the last time I saw news reports about an arrest where the arrestee plausibly benefited from the story being publicized
Bad week to say this, given Ross Ulbricht was just pardoned. There's zero chance he would've been pardoned without all the publicity around his arrest and incarceration.
History offers plenty of other examples. Daniel Ellsberg is one of the most notable that comes to mind without spending more than a few seconds to think about it.
Is it worth it? That likely depends on how highly you prioritize the protection of liberty. It’s ultimately a personal call, and I don't mean that as a judgement one way or the other.
As publication seems necessary to help free people who should not be jailed, or to keep people from being disappeared the authorities find inconvenient, it seems some other solution should be found for the ruined lives due to publication, not that we just trade some number of ruined lives around by not publicizing.
I disagree. We publish the full name of the victims, disclosing their privacy and the one of their families, but we don’t disclose the full name of the criminals.
> it's not dishonorable or shameful to be a victim of something.
That is not generally true. Or perhaps true in an idealised word, but in the real world many victims have a stigma attached to them.
Victims of scams are frequently seen as guilible or naive. I think if it were known that someone has been scammed before many would be hesitant to hire them in a postition of financial trust.
Similarly victims of rape are often portrayed in a bad light. People frequently question what did they do, or what did they wear such that what happened to them happened to them.
Female victims of domestic abuse are often portrayed as schemers who orchestrated false circumstances such that they can get their exes in trouble with the law. Male victims of domestic abuse are often portrayed as not manly enough to protect themselves.
Victims of workplace sexual harrasment are often portrayed as wrongdoers who just couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Someone who should just “took the compliment”, or perhaps be “less stuck up”. As if the real problem is that they reported what they reported as opposed to suffering it silently.
None of these attitudes are okay, but nevertheless they do exists. Being a victim of these specific crimes happens to be dishonorable and shamefull at least in some people’s eyes.
I guess it depends; see the recent case where apparently some old French lady was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of euro that she thought were being sent to Brad Pitt.
It’s bizarre and freaky to even imagine the newspapers being remotely the problem here.
The problem is the significant mismatch between the stigma of being arrested and the ease and frequency in which police perform arrests.
Arrests do not imply guilt but arresting someone later found to be not guilty should be incredibly embarrassing for the police. But this is at odds with the unhealthy amount of vindictiveness found in many societies. You get people frothing at the mouth about how cops don’t seem to arrest people so easily. Politicians are perpetually harder on crime because that satisfies fearful minds. But the price of running a society in such a broken manner eventually comes due.
How do you think the stigma of being arrested developed? It didn't come to exist in a vacuum, it exists in a feedback loop with the kinds of voyeuristic news reporting that glories in showing a captioned photo of a person at their lowest: in a mug shot.
It’s also used to stifle 2A rights. Many states require a license application which intentionally asks not whether you’ve ever been convicted of a crime but whether you’ve ever been arrested, which can then be used to deny you.
Protecting the 2A doesn't have to come at the expense of the 1A. The real problem is the license criterion that presumes guilt, not the accurate reporting of the arrest.
Specifically it tends to be referred to as a test of “good moral character”. So depending on what the reviewing officer thinks about your arrest (not conviction!) record you can be denied due to lacking good moral character, which is obviously a completely arbitrary determination hence why that practice is working its way through the courts.
I once chatted with a police department Twitter account that used to publish names and pictures of people arrested. They had said it was their duty to inform the public and I had told them they could do that without attaching stigma to people’s faces and names. They didn’t agree to anything, but had stopped doing it after a while.
The EU has a "right to be forgotten", which is why you sometimes see a notice under the google results. This usually means someone asked them to clear certain search results.
I think the arrest report is somewhat irrelevant. The neighbor could have knocked on the door and observed much of what was in the report. And without question they could report on their own firsthand experience.
I've seen the opposite - hardcore criminals who are later shown to have been sexually abused children, yet the local newspaper cannot even show a facial mugshot, let alone a full name because of zany regulations governming free press reporting of criminal apprehensions.
In the US, we have defamatory and libel case law for a reason.
When you grant criminals rights over victims, the world becomes a worse place.
A world where if we absolutely must group people into immutable categories like "criminals" and "not criminals", we at least work harder than we currently do to limit the number of people who immutably become branded as criminals.
Right... but we all know this guy beat his girlfriend from the report. She didn't want to press charges, that doesn't mean this guy is innocent and it doesn't mean he shouldn't suffer reputational harm. For the good of any future women who might consider dating him it's actually in the interest of society that people like this have arrest reports published about them. Many abuse victims are too scared to press charges and just suffer silently. In doing so it enables abusers to move on to new victims who have no way of knowing until it's too late.
Seems like a Streisand effect case to me, but I'm not Maury Blackman so I can't say whether or not his arrest for domestic violence in Mission Bay in 2021 will be more well-known now that he's bullying and suing a reporter about it and trying to make it disappear. I can't believe that he might be successful, too, the USA is at some sort of crossroads where if we're not careful the most important freedoms that we have, those we can use to fight un-democratic trash, will vanish.
He was suing to remove the report from google results so FUTURE employers do not find it. so yes, the effect mattered to him. now even if he wins that case there will be dozens others that have reported this and will be impossible to remove them all.
To an extent. Most times, it isn’t necessary to look them up. In this case, the person used a full email box, and I wanted to see if I could get them word about it. Our app is about helping folks, suffering challenges. If they are legit, then we could probably be a big help.
We Serve a small, specific demographic, and privacy is pretty important. I’d much rather not do that kind of thing. I just want to avoid admitting obvious bad actors.
We get a lot of scammers that try to sign up. We have probably let in a ringer or two, but they won’t find the app especially fruitful. It’s pretty locked-down. Facebook would be a much better hunting ground.
Also, said demographic is exactly the type that might get hit pieces posted, so it is actually an argument in favor of them being the “real deal.”
Definitely, but in this case, it may be a Streisand Effect with a $25 million payout attached.
it is unclear to me whether US law and precedent has the idea of "half-truths" being defamatory. In this case, I'd imagine that would apply if it can be applied; the plaintiff was technically arrested, but legally the arrest itself was expunged. So telling people he was arrested is a truth that definitely isn't telling the whole truth.
A judge had said that it's as if the arrest had not occurred and ordered the record sealed. Without reporting the whole story, they're certainly not telling the "truth."
In this case, the effect would not be to merely bring the arrest to light. Anyone who comes across the arrest now, is likely to come across the whole story, which is that it has been expunged and he was not guilty.
The whole story is also what the report says, which was that his partner was bloodied and cut and only recanted her story after he was being arrested, which is common in domestic abuse cases. His arrest was sealed after the charges were dropped, but he wasn't found "not guilty" or "guilty" in this case.
Also, the "effect" could be to ruin an independent reporter, not just hide or explain the arrest.
Do you not see the problem? Despite a judge discharging him without conviction, you feel as though you have the full story and he's absolutely guilty and irredeemable. You leave no room in your analysis for information the judge may have had which you do not.
No, I don’t see the problem, judges get bought all the time. Appealing to the judges decision is one of the strongest appeals to authority. I’d prefer his arrest record was public, with the case laid out, and if he was innocent and was arrested without cause then everyone could see that.
I see, so the justice system we’ve all agreed as a society to defer to, including the detectives that worked this case, don’t have the right answer but Internet Guy with 0 first hand knowledge does.
What kind of a comment or question is that? Do you have a point? I'm arguing this dude shouldn't be suing a reporter for reporting facts, you are willfully ignoring the fact that wealthy CEO-types often use money and high-powered lawyers to hide their misdeeds, who knows if this was the case here, and I am not saying it was, but how is this defamation? The guy was arrested for domestic violence, the statement by the officer states the woman was injured, what am I doing wrong here by repeating these same facts I just read in an article? Your comment is useless as-is, it's just appeal to authority.
I thought my point was obvious — you’re declaring someone guilty of a crime when you have no knowledge of the case or more generally have no idea what you’re talking about.
No I’m saying transparency is more important than some asshole who is suing a guy trying to bully him into removing information. This dude got arrested, whether he’s deemed guilty or not doesn’t matter to me, I think it’s more important to have transparency as a society. I don’t give a shit about this guy’s innocence or guilt.
Obviously you're being sarcastic, but this is pretty much how things function in 2025.
Faith in the justice system is almost zero, and widespread skepticism of mass media means that “Internet Guy online with 0 firsthand knowledge” is often viewed as just as credible as major news outlets.
I don't have an answer, but it is a sad state of affairs that people aren't incorrect to embrace.
Streisand effect is for when someone is trying to intentionally hide something from the public eye. Here the case is already in the public eye and they are suing for damages. It seems less about hiding it anymore and more about seeking damages for what’s already been shared in the public.
My first thought was if you can be sued for revealing sealed court records? Apparently in CA it is explicitly illegal:
>The lawsuit leans heavily on a California law that makes it illegal to publish an arrest report after it has been sealed by a court. The law has been attacked by First Amendment advocates, who say it violates free speech protections, strengthened in this instance because the information is an issue of public interest — an argument Blackman contests.
Just finished Kara Swisher's Burn Book today, in which she says she does not report on such scoops unless personal matters have a repeated pattern or could affect a company's stock. It never occurred to me that there is such a choice to make here, but after thinking about it a bit, I realized that this is what distinguishes a bad journalist who writes an article that could end up hurting people more and make matters worse (e.g. about people who are going through divorce), from a good journalist that writes about things that actually matter to shareholders and to the industry.
Yep, professional journalists for much of the 20th century aspired to be conscious of what they were covering and how that served the public interest. There was a duty being honored.
It was exactly this understanding that allowed closeted public figures in politics, entertainment, to navigate a time when it wasn't okay for their personal lives to be made public. Journalists and editors were often aware of stories that could be told, but believed that their duty wouldn't be served by reporting on them.
Journalism did not always look like that, and did not everywhere look like that, but it was the prevailing norm.
We're now in a very different time again, where any "scoop" that stirs moral outrage, earns lurid eyeballs, or undermines a public figure is not only fair game, but the ideal career-making story.
Precisely. This is the difference between scandal-mongering and journalism. Both can cover things that are true and factual, so can be deemed news. However, the former is closer to entertainment than it is to information of value.
I recall reading in one of Ken White's pieces that his one of his most frequent types of consultation, in his First Amendment litigation practice, is with victims of domestic violence being sued by their abusers.
Whether he did it or not, if a record was sealed and a journalist explicitly goes around publishing the details of a case and the person loses their job, I think it’s grounds for defamation. The sealed records are sealed for a reason.
This is a good point. In a similarly salient vein it is legal to drive without a seat belt in New Hampshire and federally illegal to catch lobsters below a certain size in the US.
They were sealed because the abused woman refused to cooperate with the state - a pretty common occurrence with abuse victims and definitely not “proof” that the initial arrest should be hidden from public view.
Everything in the initial report is pretty horrible.
If they were sealed, it stands to reason as well that the journalist may not have seen all the sealed records, leading to an incomplete picture. Perhaps the girlfriend had a written recantation, or came to a mutual understanding, or a psychological assessment was conducted, or it was discovered she was the instigator; we wouldn’t know, it’s sealed. Good luck defending your name publicly when your defense requires pointing to sealed records the public can’t verify.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a good basis for a justice system, but I'm under zero obligation to operate that way.
If you're arrested for assaulting your girlfriend, it's smart to err on the side of caution and not associate with you in any way. I certainly will not hire you.
"What about false accusations etc etc?"
That's exactly why arrest records should be public.
The internet never forgets as they say. I'm not sure why this person and their lawyers even thought it was a good idea to bring this into court and drag it out long enough for even more news outlets to pick it up and links to be indexed by search engines. This is never getting erased. I'd be shocked if the plaintiff somehow wins, doesn't make any sense to me.
Streisand effect is clear here but also worth pointing out that this is a clear downside of citizen journalism, or even small newsrooms: even if they’re in the wrong the rich can sue news providers into oblivion via lawyers fees alone.
They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial
Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.
None of that lines up very well with the summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker, and they couldn't afford an appeal (as they'd have to put up a $50M bond to do so). All this after a Federal court supported their assertions of fair use and First Amendment protections; Hogan then took it to a Florida state court instead.
> Not just small newsrooms; Gawker was plenty big.
Yes. It was maddening seeing news orgs everywhere yawn at this process. It was an obvious proving ground event - and today is being more widely deployed.
The same lawyer who won Gawker threatened the New York Times to not publish their stories about Harvey Weinstein's rapes,
- "Weinstein's attorney Charles Harder, who was then known for filing the suit that bankrupted Gawker, said his client would be suing The New York Times,[140] but by October 15, 2017, Harder was no longer working for Weinstein.[141]"
There were multiple other news companies (not including the Times) that were successfully dissuaded from publishing anything about the Weinstein accusations, by his litigation threats.
The Streisand effect in full force. Hiring a competent and transparent person—someone who shows remorse, regret, and apologizes while explaining why such behavior won’t happen again—despite a past conviction for domestic violence isn’t necessarily the real issue. But hiring someone who shifts the blame onto others for making the news public? That’s an entirely different problem
You are right. That's my opinion, which is of no interest at all and factually there was not any conviction.
Let me rephrase :
The Streisand effect in full force. Hiring a competent and transparent person—someone who shows remorse, regret, and explains how they’ve grown from a difficult situation—isn’t necessarily the real issue. But hiring someone who shifts the blame onto others for making past incidents public? That’s an entirely different problem.
In a world where people are eviserated for being too woke, I have no empathy for this former tech CEO who was arrested for domestic violence. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you fire and layoff DEI departments and the lowest performers, why are you crying victim when you get arrested for violent assault?
I think this case is orthogonal to woke and DEI. Would you knowingly hire anyone who's physically assaulted anyone for any position, let alone for that of a CEO?
I think the article made it very clear that there is a distinction between an arrest and a conviction.
But I guess it's very easy for you to write such a comment without ever establishing that the person is actually guilty, as if, in domestic violence, people should be considered guilty unless proven innocent? Thankfully you are not a prosecutor.
on the cusp of the incoming dead internet, there could be services provided to intentionally defame everybody of everything and just jam pack the internet with so much disinformation that nobody will be able to trust anything they read.
so this fella caught a case for domestic violence? jam the internet with bunches of fake negative charges across a swath of fake internet pages.
caught doing something stupid and reddit picked it up? jam pack it with a firehose of other plausible fake negative stories.
provide a service, get boatloads of cash, and contribute to the deadification. makes no sense to limp wrist-edly moonwalk into the dead future - barrel through it with tanks. its not like google is working all that great these days anyway
The parent comment feels like a “Reddit” comment. It appears when taken at face value defamatory and potentially in violation of California law. It implies guilt and does not use words like allegedly for things that have not been proven.
This seems like an unwise post to make, and adds nothing to the discussion. It very well may also violate the rules of HN.
In many/most jurisdiction police are pretty much forced to arrest _someone_ (usually by written policy) if there is a DV complaint, yet the conviction rate is way under 100%. It is probably the least reliable arrest record as a prediction of finding of guilt.
As someone who long was married to an abusive spouse, I'd offer that we spouses tend to view mistreatment as a workable, if difficult, part of a marriage. Our desire to put events behind us doesn't mean that the events didn't happen.
The public doesn't know what events happened if they don't make it to trial or some other public forum. An arrest record unfortunately can't distinguish between events put behind and those that never happened. A presumption of innocence barring further evidence is not an unreasonable approach.
> A presumption of innocence barring further evidence is not an unreasonable approach.
General calls to stop bullhorning about arrest details are best directed at police and justice depts first. While they get a pass, calling out anyone else makes little sense.
Is it acting in good faith to hire the professional crypto scam whitewasher Christian Ericssen (who sometimes misspells his own pseudonym Ericsen) as a representative to threaten and bribe people?
Whether or not the police report that was sealed actually says what it's reported it does, the courts did not seal the record that the recourse he chose was to hire a pseudonymous representative so spectacularly unethical and dishonest that he has a track record of whitewashing the reporting of crypto scams.
Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. I'd refuse to hire or associate with Maury Blackman just for choosing to hire Christian Ericssen/Ericsen to represent himself and threaten and bribe people on his behalf, regardless of when or how often Maury Blackman gets recorded beating his girlfriend then successfully threatens her to recant what she said in the police report.
Comments like above usually serve a couple of sentiments - not just pointing out the Striesand effect but attempting to amplify it. The trend I think got popular with the teenager involved in People v. Turner[1]. At the time there was a fair amount of fear that the case would be entirely buried due to his advantageous position in society (not altogether different than what is being discussed here). He also changed his name. So people would make comments like above on Reddit and other social media platforms as a sort of attempt to ensure that it be extremely difficult to erase attachment of the name from the incident in the future entirely.
You can see this at play still today anytime that teenager's name comes up on Reddit. Very typical example thread here[2]
That thread is pretty exemplary of the trend, someone will say "convicted rapist Brock Turner", and everyone will pile on and also state it, in some sort of attempt to continue to keep the association at the top of the search engine.
That being said, after it's been done once the original purpose is already accomplished and I'd consider it a pretty lowbrow attempt at humor after that. It probably would be considered low effort enough to warrant a downvote here.
Wealthy domestic abusers HATE to have their records known. Before Gurbaksh Chahal was banned from Twitter, I made sure everybody who saw his tweets saw what he'd done.
> Poulson described the fight as “an immense time sink.”
I'll bet that he turns out getting a big rep bump from this, though.
If it were Texas or Oklahoma, there's a good chance that he'd be thrown in jail, or get a wood shampoo, at his next traffic stop, but in San Francisco, this will not be buried.
This isn't a problem that's going to be solved by lawsuits, though, partially because Streisand and partially because in most of the cases where someone's hurt by this the newspapers have no legal obligation to refrain from publishing, so there's no grounds to sue. What we need is to reevaluate the law in light of "the internet never forgets".